Psych 111 terms (Test 4)

Social Comparison Theory

• Upwards

• Downwards

Evaluating our abilities or beliefs or understanding of ourselves to other people

• _____: comparing yourself to someone better than you

  • Makes you feel bad about ourselves but encourages us

• _____: comparing yourself to someone who is worse than you

  • Make us feel good about ourselves but does not encourage us to get better

• Ex: bronze winners tend to feel better then silver winners

Enlightenment Effect

where we learn about some sort of theory or concept, by learning about it, it changes our real world behavior

Halo Effect

 when one person had one positive trait, we assume they have many positive traits

Self fulfilling prophecy

When we believe that something will happen, we change our behavior to make it more likely that that thing will happen

Chameleon Effect

unconsciously mimicking those around us 

• Reason: want to be accepted not rejected

• increase likely hood of social acceptance

• Affective

• Behavioral

• Cognitive

Attitude Components:

• _____: Emotional reaction to stimulant

• _____:  inclination to respond to stimulus

  • How we would like to respond to a stimulant

• _____: what comes to mind because of the presentation/stimulant

  • What elements do you think about

• Strength

• Accessibility

• Ambivalence

Dimensions of Attitude:

• _____: How likely an attitude is likely to change 

  • stronger an attitude, the less likely it is to change

  • How ingrained it is in our life

  • How long we have the attitude

• _____: which attitude is going to come to mind is based on accessibility 

  • Attitude that comes to mind first is the most accessible

• _____: positive and negative feelings towards one object

  • Ex: chocolate pie tastes good but not very healthy

• Source

• Receiver

• Message

• Channel

Attitude change components:

_____: who is trying to change the attitude

_____: the attitude of the person who the source is trying to change

_____: what a source shows you to attempt to change your attitude

_____: the way they are giving the message to the receiver

Cognitive Dissonance

When we have either two ideas or two thoughts (or a thought and a behavior) that are opposite/in conflict with each other that makes us uncomfortable, we often try to compensate or gaslight ourselves to not make the ideas dissent in our perception

• 20 dollar vs. 1 dollar lie → joy of an experiment

• Come to lab to do a mind-numbingly boring task

• When done, they tell you to tell the next person the study is a lot of fun and if you do = you get money

• After they lie to the next person, they are asked how much they enjoyed the experiment

• Expectation:

  • Person who got 20 dollars would enjoy more than those with 1 dollar

• Reality:

  • the people who got paid the most money recorded lowest enjoyment

• Explanation:

  • What’s happening is that the participants feel bad for lying; generally, we don’t like liars, and it makes us feel bad about ourselves

  • The people who got paid $20 had justification to lie (anyone would) 

  • The people who got paid $1 don’t have that justification → they have to deal with the fact that they lied to someone. They can’t change the behavior they did, so they change their opinion on the task

  • If they genuinely believe that the experiment was fun, they can “get away” with lying (gaslighting themselves)

What happened in the cognitive dissonance psychological study?

• expectation vs. reality?

• reasoning

Self-Perception Theory

we don’t actually know that much about our attitudes or what we think; instead, we learn what our attitudes are by observing our behavior

• We change our attitude on something based on our perception of our behavior

• We want to reflect our thoughts based on our actions

Impression Management Theory

 Different attitudes are appropriate based on the impression we are trying to give off

Elaboration likelihood Model

• Central path

• Peripheral path

 two paths to attitude change

• _____:  focused on the message; you think you have a good argument to cause change in another individual

  • Political ads

  • Attitude change lasts longer

• _____: because we don’t have sufficient reason to make someone have an attitude change, instead you create an illusion/distractions to create potential change of attitude in an individual

  • Ex: sweet cereal brand

  • More temporary change

Foot in the door

 Starting small and getting bigger and bigger in requests until you get to your goal request

• Ex: salesman trying to sell you something at your door

  • You’ll say no but you’ll say yes to letting them sit, get water = eventually you say yes to big request

Door in the Face

Huge request that you don’t expect anyone to say yes to as first

• You then follow with a smaller/another request and because they said no at first, they feel bad for saying no so they’re more likely to say yes to the 2nd request

  • Emotional manipulation